Mr. Mann is the creator of the famous hockey stick graph, which purported to show some 900 years of minor temperature fluctuations, followed by a spike in temperatures over the past century. His work, which became a short-term sensation when seized upon by Al Gore, was later discredited. Mr. Mann made the climate spotlight again last year as a central player in the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, which showed climatologists massaging data, squelching opposing views, and hiding their work from the public.

Mr. Mann came by his grants via the National Science Foundation, which received $3 billion in stimulus money. Last June, the foundation approved a $541,184 grant to fund work "Toward Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing," which will contribute "to the understanding of abrupt climate change."

Principal investigator? Michael Mann.

He received another grant worth nearly $1.9 millionto investigate the role of "environmental temperature on the transmission of vector-borne diseases." Mr. Mann is listed as a "co-principal investigator" on that project. Both grants say they were "funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009."

The NSF made these awards prior to last year's climate email scandal, but a member of its Office of Legislative and Public Affairs told us she was "unaware of any discussion regarding suspending or changing the awards made to Michael Mann." So your tax dollars will continue to fund a climate scientist whose main contribution to the field has been to discredit climate science."

""To manage this dramatic increase without an increase in staff required us to significantly reduce our efforts to investigate grant fraud,"the inspector general recently told Congress in a budget request.

Another employee in a different case was caught with hundreds of pictures, videos and even PowerPoint slide shows containing pornography. Asked by an investigator whether he had completed any government work on a day when a significant amount of pornography was downloaded, the employee responded,

[note to blog reader, I couldn't find the above graph on SPPI but it was in original CFP article the link for which appears to be inactive now. ed.]

There is extensive discussion of the origin of the diagram in a January 5, 2007 email from Phil Jones, disgraced Director of the CRU and Wikipedia exploiter William Connolley.

As Jones says, I’ve added a few extra names in the cc of this email list to see if we can definitively determine where the figure in the subject title comes from. The background is that the skeptics keep referring back to it and I’d like to prove that it is a schematic and it isn’t based on real data, but on presumed knowledge at some point around the late 1980s. If you think it is based on something real. What we’d like to do is show this either on ‘Real Climate’ or as background in a future paper, or both.

The diagram contradicted the hockey stick graph in the 2001 Report so proving it was not valid strengthened the case. At the same time they undermined the credibility of Soon and Baliunas who proved existence of the MWP in a multitude of other records.

The first public exposure was dubbed the Chapter 8 scandal and involved Benjamin Santer. He was lead author of that chapter and rewrote portions without consulting other authors.

As Lord Monckton explains, “In comes Santer and re-writes it for them, after the scientists have sent in their finalized draft, and that finalized draft said at five different places, there is no discernable human effect on global temperature — I’ve seen a copy of this —

Santer went through, crossed out all of those, and substituted a new conclusion, and this has been the official conclusion ever since.”

Santer originally denied the accusations and said his actions were covered by the rules that required the Scientific Report agree with the Summary for Policymakers (SPM). It was an early measure of the way theCRU people used the rules to control the results....

Phil Jones refused to disclose how he calculated the increase of 0.6°C since the end of the 19th century.